Page 70 of Dice & Dekes

Knova

I’m sitting on the couch, wrapped in blankets and draped in heating pads, when Viktor comes home. He pauses at the door as he takes stock of my miserable appearance.

“Are you okay, babe?” he asks. “Are you on your period?”

“What?” I look up at him through my unwashed hair.

“That’s usually when you break out the heat mats and the weighted blanket.” He walks toward me, watching me like I’m a grenade that could detonate at any moment. “Do you need chocolate? Tea?”

“Oh, no. PTSD.” I burrow deeper into my blanket cocoon. “I had to call off today.” I turn my face toward the window and try to make sense of the dying light outside. “You’re home late.”

“Yeah. The team and I had a peer-bonding activity today. Mind if I sit down?”

“Make yourself at home,” I mumble. I feel like shit. My dreams were awful, and during my morning shower, I sort of blacked out. Next thing I knew, I was huddled in the corner of the tub. Flying was out of the question. Tomorrow, I’ll probably be embarrassed that Viktor had to see me like this, but it’s hard to care about anything right now.

Viktor settles beside me. “Hold out your hand,” he says.

It takes a minute for me to worm my arm out of the blankets and open my palm. Viktor reaches out to take my hand. Something cool slithers into my palm: the familiar weight of a chain, and the weight of the tags.

I goggle at the dog tags resting in my palm. “Viktor,” I breathe. “You—oh my God. You found them?” My fingers curl tight, as if they might vanish again.

“I did.” He kisses my temple. “The team helped, though. Coach Metcalfe gave me the afternoon. I told the guys what happened, and they dropped everything to comb through every inch of the Puck Drop. Camden found the clasp under a barstool. Coach bribed the staff to stay late and search the HVAC filters. Knight threatened bodily harm if we didn’t find them, and eventually we did, wrapped around a dusty booze bottle on a back shelf. We weren’t leaving until we had them in hand. Something tells me that getting them back isn’t going to fix everything that’s going on for you right now, but I hope it helps.”

“You have no idea.” I clutch them in my palm. “Is it okay if I…” I trail off. I know how I get during these episodes, and I don’t know if Viktor’s ready to deal with them yet. Or if he ever will be.

“If you what?” he prompts. He’s settled in next to my cozy blanket fort, eager as anything. I decide to take the leap and trust him.

“If I tell you about Mick?”

Viktor nods. “Go for it. Please.”

I run my thumb over the tags, feeling the raised outline of his name. “We were together. Serving together, but also dating.” I sniff, but it’s too late. Tears are already spilling down my cheeks. “He was a great guy, Vik. You’d have liked him. Everyone liked him. He loved reading. Not fun books, either, but this bullshit historical stuff that nobody else cared about. He sounded pretentious as hell when he talked about it.” I choke on a laugh. “And he played guitar. Not well, but better than anyone else on the base. He would make up songs about things on the fly. He made up one about the time Carson got food poisoning, and the rest of us almost died laughing.”

Viktor puts his arm around me, and I melt against him.

“We saved each other more than once. Until we couldn’t. Our helicopter got shot down, and… his head… there was no chance. He was still alive when I first… but then… fuck, Viktor, this is so hard. He was breathing. Barely. And for one awful second, I thought—maybe I could still save him. Maybe there was time.” I turn my face into his shoulder.

“You couldn’t save him,” Viktor whispers. “Like you couldn’t save that little girl.”

I let out a sob so loud, I swear he can hear my heart breaking.

“Hey, baby, it’s okay.” He rubs my back. “I know you tried. You don’t give up just because something’s hard. If you couldn’t save him, nobody could have.”

I know he’s right. Not because I’m some ludicrous Grade A badass, but because I know head injuries, and there was no chance of saving him. It happened so fast. It was so final.

That didn’t make it any less awful.

“He was going to propose.” My voice cracks. “I found the ring. Stuffed in his boot like he didn’t trust anywhere else to keep it safe.”

“Oh.” Viktor snuggles closer. “Oh, Knova, I’m sorry. You really loved him, didn’t you?”

“I did. I do.” I rub my fingers over the tags again. Losing them without warning felt like losing him all over again. Like another failure. But getting them back isn’t the same as getting Mick back, and—as terrible as it is to say—I’m okay with that. Not great, but not devastated. He’s been gone a long time, and our history matters more than this memento. If I could go back in time to save him, I would do it in a heartbeat, but if he could see me right now, I don’t think that he’d want me to fall to pieces every time I remember him. Mick was one of the best men I’ve ever known. I hope he’d be proud of me. Not for moving on, necessarily—but for not drowning. For finding someone who sees me the way he did. Maybe even more.

I truly believe Viktor would have liked him. And I think he’d have liked Vik, too.

“What can I do right now?” Viktor asks. “Do you need anything?”

I take a deep breath, fighting off the lingering darkness of my episode. “Right now, I’d like to order a pizza and watch something mindless on Netflix, if that’s okay.”

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